Buttonwood of The Economist quotes Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton of the London Business School:
….take the records of 83 countries from 1972 to 2009 (the most comprehensive set available) and rank them by GDP growth over the previous five years. Investing each year in the countries with the highest economic growth over the preceding five years earned an annual return of 18.4%, but investing in the lowest-growth countries returned 25.1%.
Read more at Investing: Growth and the markets | The Economist.